It has always been the goal of Universal and Amblin' to continue making "Jurassic Park" movies, and part of me wishes they would have greenlit the insane version that John Sayles and William Monahan wrote a few years back about a commando team of genetically-modified dinosaur/human hybrid creatures who were sent in to destroy South American drug cartels.

Alas, we have lost our opportunity to witness that particular strain of madness, and instead, there's another version that they've been developing, with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver scripting it. That's one of those totally logical moves considering "Rise Of The Planet of The Apes" managed to salvage a property that Fox had been frustrated by for decades.

I do not cover the Oscars here at HitFix, something that was voluntary. For one thing, we've got Greg Ellwood doing a great job of it with his Awards Campaign blog, and Greg has actually worked on Oscar campaigns back when he was working in studio publicity. He understands the psychology of the campaigns, and he also knows the Academy members who are voting and he has a sense of what they feel as the season wears on. Then we added Kris Tapley and Guy Lodge to the HitFix family, bringing their In Contention site into the fold, and that means we've got a lot of really smart and committed awards-season writers doing a great job of covering the ins and outs of Oscar all year round.

Is The Beyonder going to join the Marvel movie universe in "Thor: The Dark World" this coming November?

A few hours ago, I got an e-mail pitching me an interview with Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje because he has three movies coming out this year. I don't need much convincing about him in general. I've been a fan since he appeared as the terrifying Adibisi, and I'd like to interview him just to finally ask how the hell he kept that hat on in that series. He was also Mr. Eko in "Lost," a role that he made seem more significant than it ended up being in the end. He's a talented guy, and he's impossible to forget after you've seen him work.

So in this e-mail, they went over his roles this year. First, there's "Bullet In The Head," the Walter Hill action film that stars Sylvester Stallone. He's also going to be at Sundance to promote the film "The Inevitable Defeat Of Mister and Pete," which he stars in with Jennifer Hudson and Jordin Sparks. But in the description of his role in "Thor: The Dark World," they highlight that he's playing both "Algrim The Strong" and "Kurse."

Not every movie star works for every audience. There are people who make me happy every time they show up in a movie, and they haven't caught on with the mainstream for whatever reason, and there are movie stars I find baffling. Often, fandom finds itself divided along gender lines for reasons both obvious and not so obvious. What studios and filmmakers always hope for is a star who unites people, and Emma Stone appears to be just such a star.

There are many reasons people find her appealing. She's got great comic timing, and she seems to handle herself just as well in interviews as she does when her dialogue is scripted. She also rarely seems to take fame seriously, which is a healthy attitude. She's been smart so far about the films she's chosen and the collaborators she works with, and if anyone in her age group is poised for a long and interesting career, it's her.

I've got a fistful of "Gangster Squad" interviews to run in the next few days, and I thought we'd kick things off with Ryan Gosling. I know, I know… simmer down, ladies.

Gosling is at that strange place that actors find themselves sometimes where he's not really a box-office star by the standard definition. His presence in a film doesn't automatically open the film, but he's certainly as high profile as an actor can be. He's constantly photographed and magazines and tabloids spend a lot of column inches on him. He has a fairly dedicated fanbase that can be very vocal, and it certainly feels like he's one big hit away from fulfilling that full star potential.

I don't get the feeling any of that is terribly important to him, though.

When we sat down to talk on Saturday, he was my first interview of the day, and he always strikes me as a guy who knows how silly the press junket format can be, and he guards himself, using humor to make it an easy day and to also deflect anything too personal. He's good at making you feel at ease, and I would imagine that makes people feel like they can cross that line with him. It's an illusion, though, and I wanted to keep things light.

I've been interviewing Johnny Knoxville for what seems like a decade now, and living in LA, I find that I run into him on a fairly regular basis just out and about. Perhaps because of the hyper-casual nature of "Jackass," he never seemed like a celebrity, but more like a friend who just happens to have a TV show. That's part of the appeal of that program, and Knoxville is one of the easiest guys to talk to about his work that I've ever met.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, is someone I've watched my whole life but who I never had reason to meet until last week. Then, in one quick burst of three days, I rode a tank that he was driving, saw his new film "The Last Stand," and then sat down to interview him for the first time. I could have happily spent a half hour talking to him by himself, but of course, that's not how these press days are set up.

Instead, you walk in, you get your four or five minutes, and then you're done. And in this case, I had two people in one room. Thankfully, the pairing of Knoxville and Schwarzenegger is just weird enough to be really entertaining, and the film they both star in surprised me enormously.

If David Chase never worked again, his legacy would be completely assured because of the seismic impact that "The Sopranos" had on culture. That's got to be an interesting feeling for an artist, knowing that you've created something that will endure, and it's the ultimate goal of creating and sharing work with other people. You hope you'll be able to reach the largest possible audience, and when you do it and you see that work ripple through the rest of pop culture, it's a best case scenario.

Whatever you would expect as a follow-up to something like "The Sopranos," Chase had something else in mind, and his debut feature film is now playing in limited release. It's a gentle, heartfelt look back at the '60s and the way rock'n'roll changed the world, told on a personal scale.

John Magaro stars in the film as Douglas, a kid who has his world turned upside down by the British Invasion. He sees rock'n'roll as his way out of the life that he was born into, and more importantly, he sees it as a way of winning the woman he wants, played by Bella Heathcote. It is a small personal story, filled with specific observations, and it feels nakedly autobiographical. Jack Huston co-stars as another member of the band that Douglas starts, and when I sat down with Magaro, Heathcote, and Huston, I was curious about their own backgrounds in music.

I am fascinated by Los Angeles and its history, and chances are if there's a book or a film about the city, I've read it or watched it. In particular, the history of law enforcement and its failures here is something that I've been obsessed with for years. When you list the very best of what's out there, you have to include "Chinatown," a canny piece about the way water and blood were used to build what we think of as modern LA, as well as the books by authors like Walter Mosely and James Ellroy.

"Gangster Squad," liberally adapted from the non-fiction book by Paul Lieberman by real-life-LA-cop-turned-screenwriter Will Beall, is never going to be considered a classic of the genre, but the film has a certain pop cartoon charm that makes it enjoyable, if slight. Gangster Mickey Cohen has been portrayed on film a few times before. Harvey Keitel played him in Barry Levinson's "Bugsy" and was rewarded with an Oscar nomination for his work. And in "LA Confidential," Cohen makes a small appearance with Paul Guilfoyle playing the part.

In "Gangster Squad," Cohen's been promoted to the main protagonist, and Sean Penn attacks the part with a manic energy that I found wildly entertaining at times. He looks like a "Dick Tracy" villain, exaggerated and feral, and the film focuses on a period at the end of the '40s when Police Chief Parker (played by a Henson Muppet Studios version of Nick Nolte that is remarkably lifelike) decided to authorize a group of his officers to set aside strictly legal methods to bring down Cohen's operations. Basically, this is a stripped down and slicked-up version of "The Untouchables," with Josh Brolin starring as Sgt. John O'Mara, the honest cop who is put in charge of putting together his team of trustworthy men to help him.

The professionally adorable Emma Stone had it turned up to high this weekend, as usual, when we sat down to discuss her work in "Gangster Squad," the period drama that was delayed from its original release date last fall.

She's one of those people who you can tell decides that they're going to have fun doing their press, no matter what. She can't help but tease and joke and just plain laugh at the process. She started by comparing our diet sodas, which are obviously working out differently for the two of us. She look like she weighs about as much as one of my legs.

Towards the end of our interview, I decided to ask her about returning to play Gwen Stacy in "The Amazing Spider-Man" sequel. It feels like they just barely got finished with doing publicity for the first film, and now they're already gearing up for work on the sequel.

One of the things that's going to be interesting about this ongoing series is the way they're taking elements from the first three films and from the comics and putting a new spin on them. After all, we're getting a Harry Osborne in the sequel, played by Dane DeHaan, and we're getting a new Mary Jane Watson, played by Shailene Woodley, and I suspect they'll play very different roles in the life of Peter Parker than they did in the Sam Raimi movies.

When someone asks you if you want to ride a tank while Arnold Schwarzenegger drives it, you say yes.

I don't have many hard and fast rules in life, but that's one of them. It's not a rule that I've had to put to the test many times, but last week, the moment of truth finally arrived, and so I drove down to the Lionsgate offices in Santa Monica to meet a group of fellow journalists. We all boarded a bus and then headed up to the Melody Ranch Studio in Santa Clarita.

You've seen it in a million different movies, most recently in Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained," where it was used as the first town that Schultz and Django ride into, where Schultz asks for the sheriff to be brought to see them in the saloon. We ended up eating lunch in that saloon later in the day, and I intentionally sat at the same table where Django and Schultz sat while drinking their beers.

The way the day started, though, was with Arnold Schwarzenegger introducing us to his tank. He bought this particular tank in the early '90s for one of the Planet Hollywood locations, but they never ended up using it there. Instead, he kept it, and one of his main purposes for it over the years has been as part of an incentives program for a foundation he runs for inner-city kids. When the kids do well during the week, one of the rewards they can enjoy is a trip to the Melody Ranch so they can ride in the tank while Arnold drives.